1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imaging apparatus that captures moving images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, digital cameras and other imaging apparatuses are known that capture moving images and record the captured moving images in a recording medium such as a memory card (for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-101835). In recent years, some consumer digital cameras can capture moving images with a large number of pixels. Furthermore, a frame rate of captured moving images (the number of frames per unit time) is increasing.
With an increase in the number of pixels and the frame rate of captured moving images, a data amount to be processed per unit time increases; this makes it necessary to process moving image data at a speed faster than ever.
Improvements in the processing ability for moving image data require a memory that has a large storage capacity and can be accessed at high speed, and a processing circuit that can process moving image data at a higher speed, such as a microcomputer.
However, the use of these high-performance memory and microcomputer leads to an increase in the circuit scale and the power consumption. Especially, with regard to consumer digital cameras, there is demand for a reduction in size and cost as well as maximum suppression of the power consumption, and therefore a high-performance memory and microcomputer cannot be used in some cases. This gives rise to the problem that moving images with a large number of pixels and a high frame rate cannot be captured.